Friends in Unexpected Places: Enhancing Local Fairness in Federated Learning through Clustering

TMLR Paper6498 Authors

Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) has been a pivotal paradigm for collaborative training of machine learning models across distributed datasets. In heterogeneous settings, it has been observed that a single shared FL model can lead to low local accuracy, motivating personalized FL algorithms. In parallel, fair FL algorithms have been proposed to enforce group fairness on the global models. Again, in heterogeneous settings, global and local fairness do not necessarily align, motivating the recent literature on locally fair FL. In this paper, we propose new FL algorithms for heterogeneous settings, spanning the space between personalized and locally fair FL. Building on existing clustering-based personalized FL methods, we incorporate a new fairness metric into cluster assignment, enabling a tunable balance between local accuracy and fairness. Our methods match or exceed the performance of existing locally fair FL approaches, without explicit fairness intervention. To support this finding, we demonstrate (numerically and analytically) that personalization alone can improve local fairness and argue that our methods exploit this alignment when present.

Submission Type: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Rafael_Pinot1

Submission Number: 6498